Should the fine denizens of Cardiff truly regard rugby as a sport played in
heaven, then the city’s newly elevated footballers have been set an
unfeasible target to pursue.

“Even when I first came here, I thought it was perhaps more of a rugby city,” says Cardiff City manager Malky Mackay, whose team prepare to host their first top-flight match for 51 years tomorrow. “But everywhere I go people want to talk to me about football, and that makes me smile.”

His is not a lone voice. The signs, indeed, are that the Welsh capital’s twin sporting obsessions can coexist in the type of close harmony of which a local male voice choir would be proud.

Head across to Cardiff Arms Park, home of the Blues, and one cannot raise even a word of resentment towards the rise of the round-ball ruffians in this most stolid rugby heartland. “There is space in this city for a rugby team and a football team at the highest professional level,” argues Blues chief executive Richard Holland, in his office in the shadow of the Millennium Stadium. “We want to ride on the buoyancy and positive energy from City’s promotion. It spurs us on to achieve great things, too.”

Come tomorrow afternoon the hostelries of Cowbridge Road, the main thoroughfare through City’s core west Cardiff constituency of Canton, will thrum with anticipation of the visit of Manchester City. Already the walls and ceilings of the Admiral Napier pub are festooned with paraphernalia marking last season’s Championship-winning campaign, giving the lie to received notions of Cardiff as solely an egg-chaser’s town.

Mackay, a transplanted Glaswegian embraced by Cardiff City fans since his appointment in 2011, explains: “Once I arrived, I realised there was a huge fan base in our city for football. Then, as I travelled around the country, I could see the following that developed once people had a club they could be proud of. The people who spend good money to watch us at away games on Tuesday nights are the same people who came in their thousands to Cardiff Bay to watch us lift the Championship trophy. It shows the level of passion we can attract.”

It helps that Mackay makes his frequent appeals to the people of Cardiff and that, in his image at least, he embodies the virtues of uncomplicated toughness more often associated with the Blues’ leading names, such as Lions stars Sam Warburton and Leigh Halfpenny. The 41-year-old carries himself with the barrel-chested deportment of a drill sergeant, let alone a retired centre-half, and all journalists attending his press conference yesterday were warned that failure to sit in one of the 12 chairs allocated would be met with an icy refusal to speak.

But the broad swathe of support for Cardiff City’s accomplishments can be traced to far more than Mackay’s uncompromising attitude. The Welsh Government estimates that Swansea City’s first season in the Premier League generated up to £58 million for the principality’s economy, while creating or safeguarding around 400 jobs at a time when they were disappearing at the same rate elsewhere, not least at Port Talbot Steelworks.

The intention is to replicate the regenerating effect in Cardiff, where the club’s Canton Stand will be renamed “Croeso” – Welsh for welcome – this season to allow prominent advertising by the regional tourist board.

Mackay connects with a wider audience when he talks of the “warmth” that he and his wife Pamela felt upon moving to Wales, while describing the Welsh way of life as “immensely endearing”.

There is a mounting sense that his side’s challenge in the Premier League is a cause to unite Cardiff suburbs from Llandaff to Llanrumney and to cross the imagined schism between the city’s football and rugby fraternities.

Cllr Heather Joyce, leader of the council, says: “The whole city is behind them. Their games are beamed around the world, which is brilliant for Cardiff’s profile. These are difficult times, and Cardiff and the region can enjoy significant benefits from the increased visitor revenue and global exposure that the club can help to bring.”

Even Holland, at the helm of the Blues as club rugby vies increasingly for attention on the edges of the football juggernaut, does not disagree. “With Cardiff and Swansea it is fantastic having two Welsh teams in the top division, although it is a difficult environment for us to stay there. We just have to make sure that there are no clashes on the fixture lists, that we are always playing on a Friday night when their matches are on a Saturday. The early signs are that we are still holding firm on our season-ticket sales.”

One inescapable worry for the Blues is the prospect of increased capacity at Cardiff City Stadium, as the club’s Malaysian owner, Vincent Tan, aims to enlarge the average home gate from 26,000 to 38,000 by the start of the 2014-15 season. Should the trend continue, Holland is right to be alarmed about the potential erosion of rugby’s traditional strongholds. “We’ll be watching closely,” he says. “If they take it up to 50,000 and the demand is there, I think there is only so much extra resource in people’s pockets for extra sport. That would be concerning.”

The Cardiff City of recent vintage have sometimes appeared, all too vividly, to be an institution of conflicted identity. Tan’s incendiary decision last year to change the time-honoured Bluebirds’ home ensemble of blue, white and yellow to an incongruous red-and-black get-up, if only because red was the colour of joy in south-east Asia, threatened to alienate legions of longtime fans and to give an impression that the club were a mere plaything operated from Kuala Lumpur. The euphoria of promotion, however, has highlighted the transience of those objections.

While Cardiff’s season began inauspiciously, with last weekend’s 2-0 defeat at West Ham, Mackay maintains that his team can continue to exert their grip over the city. “I have seen the most incredible supporters of my team,” he says. “Two years ago I promised them that it wouldn’t be lack of effort they would see. It was about giving them pride to wear the Cardiff City shirt again. They might see mistakes but they can forgive you for those. It is a lack of commitment that they would never tolerate.”

What has been seen as a consequence of Mackay’s insistence upon this blood-and-thunder loyalty is the steady encroachment of football upon rugby’s most sacrosanct territory.

There is a nostalgia in glimpsing the gates of Ninian Park, the old hovel demolished in 2009 and renowned for its febrile atmosphere, but the Cardiff City Stadium now cemented in its place has grown into a cauldron all of its own.